The Myths of Customer Experience & Satisfaction – 3 Lessons . . .

Customer satisfaction and heightened experience sometimes seem like a mythical “Shangri-La” that, in reality, turn out to be more of a “journey” than a “destination.

We discuss them frequently and we try to measure them by interrupting our customers’ lives with ever greater frequency,

Most of us are using NPS as the measure, and that’s another story as to the effectiveness of the dynamics and practical impact on the customer 😉

An interesting article by John Sills, author of “The Human Experience”, explored three lessons in customer experience from a recent report analysing the “barometer of customer satisfaction”.

The findings are interesting and may be surprising or unsurprising depending on your perspective and cognitive biases. John outlines three lessons;

1. Expectations vs Reality
2. The drivers of customer decisions aren’t always what they seem
3. People see People as a source of certainty

Expectations vs Reality.

• It seems that we’re no happier than we were. Survey results are surpisingly consistent over the years.  It turns out that customer satisfaction and NPS survey scores are not a measure of things getter better or worse. They are a measure of how things compare to our expectations, which change. And in that regard, the level of experience we get versus what we think we should get, is exactly the same as it was in 2014. And it will be in 2034: we’re always about 75% satisfied with what we get versus what we’re promised. I get the point, and I probably can’t argue with that . . . 😉

Drivers of Customer Behaviour & Actions

• Customer responses to satisfaction surveys tend to indicate a correlation between customer satisfaction and their future decisions. It’s easy to think that this is just about the service customers receive, but it’s important to remember customer decisions are influenced by a whole load of factors – including, often, perception over reality. David Ogilvy, the famed founder of Ogilvy & Mather known as the “Father of Advertising”, was renowned for his meticulous research into consumer habits. His research led him to assert that “customers don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say”. 

“People on People”

• A third of customers say they are willing to pay more to receive excellent service! For a long time, futurologists have talked about ‘The Human Premium’ – that people will be willing to pay more for human service. With the advent of “actually useful AI”, it looks like that theory is about to be put to the test. But for now, at least, real people firmly have their place in creating certainty for customers. When asked why, the top reason is the same as it always was – people are in search of certainty, wanting to know that they’ll be easy to contact, that someone is there to help if needed, that they’re making the right decision. This really matters, because getting support – and being there when things go wrong – remains the area which in which customers are least satisfied at the moment. When organisations are asked to put things right, how do they do it? Well, according to customers, the number one way that organisations show they care is by making it easy to speak to someone when they need to, with a combination of technology and humans seen as the perfect combination.

There is some food for thought here in our race to eliminate the “human touch” from customer service.

I wrote earlier this year that maybe 2025 would be the year when customer service with a real person became a value proposition! 😂

I had been to a website to find out about a specific product from a retailer. The omnipresent customer service chatbot popped up, my heart sank, only to read “Hi, I’m a real person from the sales & support team. Please let me know if you have any questions or need any assistance”.

The experience filled me with unbridled joy, and my question was resolved clearly and simply in a 20 second conversation.

Customer Experience counts . . . .

The essence of John’s article and the report he comments on, is worth exploring;

• Organisations are always promising a little more than they deliver.
• Earning customer decisions requires understanding all the things that matter to them.
• And if things go wrong, you have to put them right, with people willing to pay more for certainty, even possibly for the actual people that can deliver it!

Maybe there are better ways of thinking about customer experience and satisfaction, and maybe even better ways of measuring it?

You can read John Sills’ article “Three Lessons from the Institute of Customer Service Report” here . . . .

The Myths of Customer Experience & Satisfaction – 3 Lessons . . .

Thanks for reading . . .